


the only way out is through

by cryptoThelematrix (Tiferet)



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Demonic Possession, Derse Dreamers, Dream Bubble, F/F, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Possession, Psychological Horror, Psychological Trauma, eldritch horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 19:17:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/613319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiferet/pseuds/cryptoThelematrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even if things were different, they'd still be the same girls, who grew up reading different books and dreaming of different things.  The only thing the game does is make it all possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the only way out is through

**_Rose: Take a break._ **

You are tired, and you aren’t sure if you should be, or not.

The thing about living your life on a meteor hurtling through a place outside any of the universes you have ever known before is that it does a number on your sense of time. All the reference points are gone—there is no star to orbit and no planet to revolve. There is no cycle of light and darkness. You can turn the lights on or off whenever you want, and if, for instance, you are made of light, and you have a girlfriend who glows in the dark, even that doesn’t matter.

You have no way of knowing how long you’ve been trying to pick the important secrets out of this book (which is also full of entirely petty, useless ones) but your forehead is starting to feel like your hands do when you have to unravel a lot of knitting or help Kanaya pick stitches out of a garment you’re going to remake.

You have no way of knowing how long you’ve slept, or if you sleep enough. It shouldn’t be so surprising, because you know how neurotransmitters work and how cycles of light affect the human brain, but it’s hard to get enough sleep when you haven’t got mornings and nights.

Everything that happens on the meteor just seems to collapse into this long, eternal, three-year _now_. Which probably would make some kind of sense to someone who was good at physics, like Jade. You’re not even sure if time is supposed to exist outside of the universe you came from, but it must, because Dave’s here, and he’s made of time the way you’re made of light.

“Are You All Right?”

You can hear the capital letters in Kanaya’s voice and it makes you smile. “I suppose I am.” You rub your eyes and blink. It’s very bright in here, isn’t it?

“Do You Need To Get Some Sleep?” Kanaya closes her book. “You Shouldn’t Deny Yourself.”

“I’m not,” you say; you know Kanaya doesn’t need to sleep, and you wish that you didn’t either.

You close your book and set it aside, and your notes as well. You reach across the table for Kanaya’s hands, which Kanaya slides into yours. Kanaya’s hands are cooler than yours. They were probably cooler than yours are even before Eridan killed her, because she has cooler blood; but now they are cooler than anything that glows has got a right to be.

You find it soothing. Even as a child you sometimes found the warmth of human embraces a little bit stifling. “I pity you,” you whisper, carefully enunciating the words in unfamiliar Alternian.

Kanaya squeezes your hands. She is very strong, which is also soothing. Her fingers are thin and a little bony, and her claws are painted the colour of her skirt. It looks a little like Christmas, green blood just under the pale grey skin and that red sparkling paint. “I Love You,” she says, in English, just as carefully.

You smile, and you feel it spreading across your face, all the way; it’s an unfamiliar sensation, or was before recently. You look into each other’s eyes for a while.

Kanaya breaks the silence. “Do You Want To Go To Sleep Or Make Out?”

“Both,” you say, “but not now. I had it almost figured out…” You bite your lip and glance back at the book. You feel guilty, guilty for denying yourself and denying Kanaya, and guilty for wasting time (which doesn’t exist), because you have to learn everything you need to know to beat Lord English and find your way to Jade and into the new session, preferably not all at the very same time; but you also have to savour every moment with Kanaya, because who knows how many more moments anyone still alive (or at least ambulatory) has got left?

Kanaya nods, as if she’d expected that answer.

“I think I need the lights out in here,” you say, finally letting your breath out. “It’s too bright.”

Kanaya chuckles. “That’s A Little Ironic Coming From You,” she says, and you laugh, because it is, and because Kanaya is better at irony than she thinks she is.

“I know. But I’d rather read in the dark, by the light of your glow.”

Kanaya smiles wryly. “All Right,” she says, “But In That Case I’d Rather Be Lounging On Something Softer Than This.”

“That’s a good idea,” you agree, giving in, and you follow her into the room that passes for her respite block sometimes, knowing you won’t get much reading done. Resigned to being looked after, for now.

 

**_Kanaya: Distract yourself while Rose sleeps._ **

Rose is asleep, slumped halfway across your lap, and you are smiling at her with a fondness you are sure must look completely witless on your face no matter how well you have made yourself up. As usual, she’s overworked herself. You are rather certain that humans are supposed to sleep more frequently and for longer periods of time than Rose does. But humans don’t normally dream with the horrorterrors.

When you finally bisect that clown (and you will) you are going to take any sopor slime he still has left, and somehow you will find a way to make it help Rose.

But everything is all right, for now.

Things worked out exactly the way you had wanted them to. Rose had been unable to manoeuvre the heavy book into a comfortable position while curled up with you on the pallet you rest on in lieu of a proper (and no longer needed) recuperacoon. At last you took the book away from her (it was getting odd orange dust all over your favourite red brocade throw pillow) and she settled into your arms for a short and deliciously uncomfortable makeout session. Someday soon you are going to have to find out if everything down there still works the way it did before you got perforated. According to Hannah Oryzka, it shouldn’t; but kissing that girl makes your nook feel deliciously empty and your bulge still swells. So maybe Stevia Meyron was right.

You always liked her books the best.

You’ve also had a little drink of delicious bright red. You’re confident Rose will sleep for a while this time, and feel better (despite your drink) on account of it.

One of your favourite novels is lying just within reach, but you don’t pick it up. You don’t need to read the words; you know them very nearly by heart.

A few sweeps ago you believed you were just like Zabell Shahar, although you didn’t know back then that it was really possible for you to become a true rainbow drinker. You wanted to feel your emotions run infrared, tearing through you in places where the red and the black are so dark they pool in your bilesacs together until they are indistinguishable. You wanted to flip through the quadrants the way Zabell did with Lady Aduvar Kholan, who insisted at first that they could only be pale for each other, then succumbed to Zabell’s red seduction only to flip black because she wanted Zabell to succeed in the Fleet and live up to the promise of her blood—and then wax black for Zabell’s moirail Yaakov, who could not decide if he hated Aduvar more for being Zabell’s matesprit or being her kismesis, forcing Zabell into ash until they flipped red again.

And back. And again. And back. And again.

Vriska had said that Zabell Shahar was a terrible, boring character who put up with poor treatment because she cared more about being pitied than she cared about winning, and Aradia had chimed in to say that Zabell was empty and selfish as well—hilarious, coming from someone who was still reading Starship Pals. But you understood Zabell as a person who lived too much in her head (like you) and too far apart from her peers (like you)—a person who wanted to feel more and think less and experience things that her blood and her caste had forbidden her.

You could have argued the point, but there was never any point in arguing with Vriska (which was probably why she could never keep a kismesis). Vriska had loved the way that you knew her in all her awfulness and pitied her anyway. She complained about your meddling but she always came back for more. She took advantage of your pity when she found it convenient. You tried to tell yourself you didn’t mind, and you told yourself that you could be pale for her if she needed you to, but you couldn’t. Knowing this makes you uncomfortable, because you don’t like thinking of yourself as having that much in common with Eridan. Or…Yaakov.

That is a disgusting thought and you are not going to complete it: you know better.

Rose’s whole body jerks, but her eyes are still closed. She doesn’t wake up; she just shivers a little. You know you’re not warm enough to keep the cold out of her bones, but there is a heavy fur cloak at the foot of the pallet and you toe it into reach, then try to settle it around her. She is flushed bright red. The first time she did this, you were afraid she was ill.

You shake her shoulders but she doesn’t wake. Instead she begins to mutter under her breath.

She isn’t talking to you.

 

**_Rose: Commune._ **

It’s a little like flying; you move so smoothly through the air, which falls away from your burning skin in beads like spilt mercury. The air is radiant with poison; you are the darkness that makes it so bright. Everything seems to move slowly. Your thoughts take flight at a velocity that part of you still remembers is called hypomania. You are above it all; you see the world in pixels; you are larger than all of them, your thorns seizing the quantum threads, knitting a path you can only imagine in darkness. You are smaller than the spirals whirling in your cells, dividing and dying and recombining. You are bigger than the meteor hurtling through the foam of dreams. Are you seeing the future or making it happen, or is it making you? The thorns feel like they grew from your shoulders down through your hands, from the whirling tangle of screaming tongues that took root in your heart.

It’s a little like drowning, because the liquid aether swirls around you in the space the air leaves behind, flowing like heavy water. It’s a little like drowning because sometimes you know you are trapped. Your reflexes are faster than ever, but your limbs feel heavy and unfamiliar. There is no good reason why knees and ankles should be the only places legs can bend, and why do they bend in so few directions? Sometimes when you and Kanaya are kissing behind bookshelves you wonder why you have no bulge, or if maybe your clitoris will swell and become one because you want to fuck her so much. You wonder if you could have learned to breathe water the way Feferi and Eridan did. You feel like you are at the bottom of an ocean. The water tastes like menstrual blood and jade-coloured milt and an alien sea. The surface is far above you, and harder to reach every time you lie down for a rest. The meteor is far below you, even when you are asleep in your bed on it.

You see the others—your brother, your lover, your friends—from a terrible distance. You are above and below them; you encircle them in your tentacles, and you dance in tiny spirals in their cells, flailing to a melody played in eleven dimensions on even tinier strings.

_Meow._

Then he comes, and the dying begins all over again, and all you can do is watch. Do They really think you could save Them?

 

**_Kanaya: Be terrified._ **

One of these days you realise you are going to have to stop telling yourself that things are all right for now. That’s almost always when it all goes wrong again.

Rose is shivering under the fur. Her skin has gone grey, darker than yours used to be, and she is still talking to someone you hope isn’t actually here. You have tried three times to wake Rose up. It hasn’t worked, and you are beginning to blame yourself. Maybe if you hadn’t taken a drink from her, she’d be able to resist this. You are trying hard not to wonder if she would taste differently now that her skin has gone grey.

You remind yourself: this has happened before. So often, in fact, that you prefer to be around when Rose is trying to sleep—since you don’t have to, any more. Dave and Terezi are sure you are “banging like an orchestra composed entirely of drums” which is someone’s actual quote, you think, except that it sounds too overly literate to be Dave and not nearly gluttonous enough to be Terezi. Perhaps they were quoting Karkat that time. It’s annoying, because it’s not true.

(You haven’t pailed her yet. Neither of you had ever pailed anyone else when you were alive, and you’re not sure how everything works—she’s human, and you’re a rainbow drinker. You don’t even know if you can control the urge to take a nip—it’s hard enough when you’re making out—or how hard it would be to stop yourself while you’re pailing her. It would probably make sense to ask Porrim about this, but it’s embarrassing enough just being you when she’s around.)

All of the bottles on the chest that serves as your makeshift vanity are shaking. Does this meteor have tectonic plates? One of them falls and shatters. And now she’s glowing brighter than you do, but differently: the light seems brighter around her because she’s absorbed all the darkness.

She does this to herself.

Maybe she doesn’t want to wake up.

When you were reading books like _Daybreak_ and _The Rainbow Drinker Who Thinks He’s a Rock Star_ , Rose was reading books like _The Secret Key of Gnarlyathotep_ and the _Necropanopticon_. She chose this. She might even go on choosing this, even when everything’s over, assuming of course that when everything’s over it isn’t because you’re all finally dead in the way that nobody ever came back from. You wanted romance and excitement and feeling. You don’t know what Rose wanted. When people prefer to read things like the _Necropanopticon_ (or even the _Tanya Groller_ books) rather than stories like _Daybreak_ , what do they want but not have? And what do they want more than pity or hatred or…love?

You haven’t forgotten the conversation you had before everything went dark around Rose and you weren’t sure if she was going to live or die. You told yourself then you were tired of playing the game where you desperately want the person you pity not to go hurt themselves, but you know they will, and you know you can’t stop them.

What does she want more than you?

You are nothing like Yaakov, you think, although it’s a silly thought to return to while rushing around to get all of the breakable things on the ground and hoping your matesprit won’t choke on her own tongue.

You are also not much like Zabell, who would long ago have brought Vriska to heel. You are seeing yourself in Aduvar now. Rose is going to do what she wants and seek what she seeks and learn what she wants and be what it makes her. There is no way to stop her, and if there were, who would she be? Rose is Zabell, not you.

She’s the one who would challenge the Volturimperatrix and her army just to save one person she loved. She is the one who could auspistice a blood feud between two powerful clades to make them allies against an impossibly powerful enemy. She dreams with dread F’thulhu and hideous Gnarlyathotep. She is going to take risks with herself and with you, and someday, nothing will stop her; not love, not sleep deprivation, not fear, and certainly not minor blood loss.

Rose takes foolish risks with herself as often as Vriska did; and it’s almost worse that she pities you back. Zabell would have been a Light player, too.

You hate and love the recklessness of the Light with a pity so exquisitely painful it nearly runs black. This emotion is not as much fun as you thought it would be.

You suspect that the eldritch horrors and alien geometry are not as much fun as Rose had expected, but it still doesn’t help. You promised yourself that you wouldn’t come back to this place. But here you are, just that copy of Daybreak falls open to your favourite scene when you pick it up. You are here; you came back, like Aduvar did—like she always would.

You have got to trust Rose. No matter how hard it is.

She is thrashing under the fur. It was the last thing Nepeta ever gave you; she killed it herself; and you don’t let that stop you from letting Rose dig her strange clawless fingers into it as though she could push them right through. A sweat has broken out on her brow.

Her eyes pop open, black and violet and red, the white swallowed up in it all, and she screams one word that drives itself right through your eardrums and feels like an ice pick. Then she curls in on herself like a grub you just poked with a stick and begins to sob, and you’re grateful you can still hear her crying.

 

**_Rose: Breathe._ **

They used to say that you belonged with Them. There’s nowhere you’ve ever belonged, but it was a nice thought while it lasted. You’re god tier now, and They can’t force their way through, but it doesn’t mean you don’t feel Their gravitational pull, down and out of your body, over and above and below and within. Your body even now is so much smaller than the rest of you. There isn’t room for all of you; there surely isn’t room for all of you and all of Them. But They’re afraid.

They always screamed, but They were never afraid before.

You are not just living in interesting times. You are living in strange eons, the kind of strange where even death may die. It was easier when you were the one who was terrified. The demon—Caliborn—is still out there, still killing things that should not be able to die.

Dave thinks he can stop this. He thinks it’s his job. Because he is Dave. And he would. He’s the hero, he’s got this.

That must be why he spends all his time goofing off with Terezi and the Mayor and fighting with Karkat, because he is absolutely going to stop Lord English by beating him in a rap battle, or burying him in a cairn of canned food.

He won’t be able to do this without you, and you hope he knows it.

Kanaya’s looking down at you in utter terror. You realise that it’s because you’re laughing at your own unspoken joke, and whatever you were doing a minute ago wasn’t funny. You reach for her hand, kiss her fingertips, still breathing hard because even the air doesn’t feel right; being all the way down in your body again is like trying to wear a pair of jeans from when you were ten.

“Are You Sure That You Want To Keep Doing This?”

You don’t know if she means the thing you are doing with her or the thing you are doing out there. But the answer’s the same either way, and you nod because you are still trying to remember how to make words in your mouth.

Kanaya sees the nod. She looks like you’re breaking her heart. “So Am I,” she says, and there’s more than a hint of defeat underneath all the pity and love and confusion.

“I’m sorry,” you finally breathe.

“No,” says Kanaya. “You’re Not. And You Don’t Have To Be.” She leans over and kisses your forehead.

“I had a bad dream,” you begin, and she puts a finger up to your lips.

“That Was Obvious, And It Was Not A Dream.”

You close your eyes for just a moment, because you feel so guilty you can’t stand to look at her. “I know.”

“Do You Want To Talk About It?”

You open your eyes again and look up at her, reaching to push her hair away from her eyes, and rest your hand on one of her horns, very carefully. She leans into it, and you start to stroke her horn. She closes her eyes.

“I Guess Not.”

“They’re afraid,” you say. “They’re being killed. They didn’t know They could die.” You swallow. “I didn’t either.”

Kanaya nods. This is not altogether new information. “I’m sorry,” she says, just like that: no capital letters involved.

You sit up and push yourself into her arms; she pulls you even closer, body to body, and you hope the open wound in her belly doesn’t hurt. As you bury your face in the curve of her neck, you breathe: “You don’t have to be.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1) It's totally OK if you want to swipe the _Daybreak_ books to mention in your own stuff. I am an actual (non-ironic/non-lulz) fan of Twilight, but I never expected to have to go there and I have yet to exact my full revenge on Kanaya for making me. *g*
> 
> 2) I hope this is dark enough for you, dear recipient. I ran _Call of Cthulhu_ for a ridiculous number of years but I always preferred inflicing psychological horror over the other kind and when I saw you wanted horrorterrors without non-con or body horror, I hoped I would be the right gifter for you.
> 
> 3) I just want to know, am I the only one who hears Kanaya's voice as Bebe Neuwirth's?


End file.
